


By the pricking of my thumbs

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Series: Fairytales and Fripperies [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-26
Updated: 2012-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-19 15:56:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/575021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her hair is fire-bright on the pale blue of her pillow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By the pricking of my thumbs

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the kink meme - Sansa and Jaime in Sleeping Beauty.
> 
> AU as all fuck. Twisted slightly because Cersei's vanity is a powerful vehicle and we're seeing her paranoia about Maggy's prophecy from Jaime's perspective so it looks a bit odd.
> 
> In fact, this whole thing is a bit odd. Sorry, OP.
> 
> (has kickstarted a project in which I will attempt to write Sansa as every Disney Princess ever with a different ASOIAF character as her prince in each, details over on my tumblr)

It all began with the birth of a baby girl and three godparents and a jealous queen, but it will all end with a kiss.

It always seems to end with a bloody kiss, Jaime thinks, but he has to admit that this is the most absurd kiss of the whole bloody lot, mostly because he's the one supposed to administer it.

 

* * *

 

_"The fairest in the land!" Cersei shrieked, crystal smashing against the wall and rainbowing to the ground in a tinkle. "_ I  _am the fairest! She will not usurp me!"_

_"I doubt the child has thought of usurping you, sweet sister," Jaime said from the bed, folding his arms behind his head and grinning. "I imagine a babe of two moons has more pressing concerns. Nursing and shitting, for example."_

_She was raging that night, her nails sharp on his back, her teeth sharp on his neck and shoulders, and he told her that she was the most beautiful woman to have ever lived._

_She believed him, and for a time there was peace._

* * *

It all began when the babe was promised beauty and grace and goodness, two women and a man huddling around her cradle and clucking over her with varying degrees.

"She'd want to be very good indeed to be as good as  _you've_ made her look," Olenna sniffed at Maggy, folding her arms and scowling. 

"And very graceful, too," Jon fretted, a frown twisting his mouth under his moustache. "Did you really have to make her quite so beautiful, Maggy? Olenna and I have a long labour ahead of us because of you."

Maggy just smiled and looked across the room, meeting Cersei Lannister's eyes for a moment before laughing.

Jaime remembers being there that day - well, everyone was there that day - and he hadn't seen anything about the child that marked her out as special. If only he'd known.

 

* * *

 

_"Those three are making her into everything I am supposed to be!" Cersei fumed and raged, storming up and down across her solar with her skirts swirling scarlet around her ankles. "I am the Queen! I am the fairest woman in the land! Not some snot-nosed Northern brat!"_

_"Whatever will you do, sister?" Jaime asked disinterestedly - Cersei's jealous tantrums were nothing new, after all - until he realised Cersei had stopped moving._

_"I will make sure she cannot replace me."_

* * *

 

Sansa Stark is terribly beautiful as she grows into her woman's body, her woman's face, and those godparents of hers are more fiercely protective of her even than her parents themselves.

But Sansa Stark is also susceptible to beauty and seemingly ignorant to the notion of evil in the world, and it is no great challenge for Cersei to befried her when she is fifteen and brought to court to share her beauty and grace and goodness with the world.

Jaime watches, annoyed with himself for noticing things like the slope of the girl's nose and the depth of her over-large blue eyes, but it is difficult not to notice such things when she always seems to stand where the light catches her to best advantage, when surrounding herself with other pretty girls only seems to make her seem prettier.

She never calls him Kingslayer, either. Always Ser Jaime. It's a rare one he hasn't at least overheard whispering about the Kingslayer, but he sometimes wonders if Sansa Stark is capable of the ill-will intended in his nickname. He doesn't think so.

 

* * *

 

_Cersei does not pace. She does not fume._

_"They will forget her," she says against his shoulder as she winds her arms around him, presses her breasts to his back. "She will be nothing, in time, just like Elia Martell and Lyanna Stark and Ashara Dayne."_

_Jaime does not say so, but he cannot imagine anyone ever forgetting Sansa Stark. Nobody ever forgets those truly worthy of Cersei's jealousy._

* * *

 

The whole realm seems to hold its breath when word spreads that some accident has befallen sweet Sansa, and her godparents three seem to panic.

Or rather, Olenna Tyrell and Jon Arryn panic. Maggy the Frog (how she became godmother to the child of one of the most important men in the realm will always escape Jaime) seems almost content as she bathes the girl's brow with rosewater and twines ribbons as blue as robin's eggs through her hair.

Jon Arryn in particular worries - the maesters say there is nothing they know that will wake the girl, nothing at all, and as Lord and Lady Stark lament, Jon Arryn, Olenna Tyrell and Maggy the Frog cluster around the girl.

And they wait.

 

* * *

 

" _Maggy tried to make her prophecy come true, the old bitch," Cersei crows, jubilant in her victory. "I saw to it that it won't."_

_"The girl yet lives," Jaime murmurs as they stand at the window and watch the Starks ride north, their lovely girl in a padded wagon. She sleeps, sleeps and sleeps and does not stir._

_"She will sleep for as long as she lives," Cersei says, a cruel twist to her smile and a malicious light in her eyes. "Nothing will wake her."_

_Maggy the Frog appears as if from nowhere in Jaime's rooms in the White Tower that night, and she says otherwise._

* * *

 

"The Queen is mad."

Everyone says it, louder now that Robert is dead than before, and as Jaime watches Cersei spiral deeper into the delirium of finally having power (because Joffrey, whatever his own madness, has no idea the power his mother is wielding over his small council) and feels sick.

This is not the woman he has loved all his life.

This is not the beautiful lioness of the Rock, proud and golden and perfect.

This is something else entirely.

 

* * *

 

_He kisses her and moves away, and she is first confused and then angry._

_"You cannot be without me," she hisses, her fingers tight around his wrist and that gleam in her eyes that makes him so sad. "We are one and the same, Jaime."_

_He thinks back on what Maggy said that night, that there is good in him if he escapes her poison._

_Her hand grips tighter, and he cannot pull away._

_"I sometimes wonder if we are," he says quietly, and he squeezes her wrist with his free hand until she lets go._

* * *

 

The old witch warned him, and she was right - things pour from beyond the Wall and the Starks send south for help.

Joffrey, horrible little shit that he is, refuses.

Jaime ignores Joffrey's orders, his father's and Cersei's, and rides north. He cannot quite explain why, but he somehow feels that the worse Cersei becomes, the better he should be, as if one of them must balance the other.

The Others are everywhere. The Starks and their people are barricaded in Winterfell, trapped behind ice and snow and death, cut off from the rest of the world and protected only by their hot springs.

Jaime has courted death his whole life (because he knew what might happen if he and Cersei were caught, he is not stupid, and he has always danced that line when he had a sword in his hand), and he does not fear it.

He refuses to fear these Others.

 

* * *

 

It is a long campaign. His hands are frozen so badly, are so stiff with chilblains, that it is an effort to wield his sword. 

But they are winning. Jaime has never lost, and he does not intend to start now.

 

* * *

 

The Others breach the walls of Winterfell, and Jaime and his men (Addam among them, Addam who has lost two fingers and the tip of his nose to frostbite because he was too stubborn to wrap up well enough) charge after them, hoping that the enclosed space will give them an advantage.

It does. It bloody well does, even if Jaime has to chase the bastard things along madly twisting corridors, slipping and sliding on the frosty trails they leave behind them, even if he nearly cuts Ned Stark and his sons down more than once genuinely by accident.

Well, mostly by accident. Ned Stark is an obnoxious shit when he wants to be, which is most of the time.

Maggy's words echo in his ears as silence engulfs the castle. He is standing at the top of a great staircase, where he should be able to catch every bounce of sound in the place.

There is nothing.

He walks along the halls, wiping the queer oily-icy residue from his sword as he goes, and is too tired to question where he is going.

And then he sees her.

"Damned witch," he curses under his breath as he takes in Sansa Stark's still sleeping form, wondering what it was Cersei did to the girl to leave her like this.

Her hair is fire-bright on the pale blue of her pillow, and her lips pearly pink.

"Can't hurt," he decides, thinking on the absurdity of kissing this woman-child on the word of a mad old bat who had helped drive Cersei to insanity. He has only ever kissed a handful of women before - Cersei, but that is gone, his mother just before she birthed Tyrion, the back of Elia Martell's hand before he returned to Aerys' side - and so he feels awkward when he kneels at Sansa's bedside (she is near a stranger, if nothing else) and brushes his lips against hers.

She is warm. He assumed she would be cold.

Her eyes open slowly, the same robin's egg blue as the ribbons in her hair, and she smiles.

"I did not expect you," she says, and her fingertips touch the frostburn on his cheek. "One like you, mayhaps, but not you."

He raises an eyebrow. 

"There are none like me," he tells her, standing up and crossing the room to where someone (he sense the witch's hand in this) has left a washbasin and a jug of water. "Only me."


End file.
